Literary equations and other bookish things
I dunno what it is about this week, but I'm feeling politically-fatigued. I know there's a lot of important stuff happening out there, but I just can't get up the energy to blog about it. Also I'm veryveryvery busy at work, and since I hate my job, that gets kind of draining as well. I'm sure I'll be gracing you all with my punditry and wonkishness in the near future, but today I'd rather go to my happy place, which is filled with books, lattes and cats. In the former category, there are a couple of threads on the always excellent I Love Books that are fun to play with.
1. Reductive Literary Equations: How would you represent a given novel or author in equation form? Three of my favorites posted so far:
- Paradise Lost - (Harry Potter X The Wizard of Oz) = His Dark Materials
- moby dick - genius = jaws
- Martin Amis - Kingsley Amis = John Kennedy Toole
2. The A to Z books that explain you: in a spinoff from this column, create an alphabet of either books or authors that would give someone a good sense for who you are. I've often thought that a list like this would be the perfect introduction to me, since I think my personality has been so largely informed by the books I've read. So here's mine. I limited myself to no more than three authors per category:
- A: Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Douglas Adams
- B: A. S. Byatt, Samuel Beckett, Frances Hodgson Burnett
- C: Caryl Churchill, Thomas Carlyle, Michael Chabon
- D: Charles Dickens, D'Aulaire, Roald Dahl
- E: Umberto Eco, Euripides, T.S. Eliot
- F: Michael Frayn, Robert Frost, Helen Fielding
- G: Rumer Godden, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves
- H: Joseph Heller, James Herriot, Eric Hobsbawm
- I: Henrik Ibsen, John Irving, Kazuo Ishiguro
- J: P. D. James, Terry Jones, Samuel Johnson
- K: William Kotzwinkle, Tony Kushner, Milan Kundera
- L: Maud Hart Lovelace, C. S. Lewis, Andrew Lang
- M: L. M. Montgomery, George MacDonald, A. A. Milne
- N: E. Nesbit, Pablo Neruda, Ogden Nash
- O: Sean O'Casey, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell
- P: Plato, Philip Pullman, Rosamunde Pilcher
- Q: Thomas de Quincey, Anna Quindlen
- R: Mary Renault, J. K. Rowling, Richard Russo
- S: Shakespeare, Dorothy Sayers, Tom Stoppard
- T: J. R. R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Angela Thirkell
- U: Barry Unsworth, John Updike, Sigrid Unset
- V: Voltaire, Paula Vogel, Henry Vaughan
- W: T. H. White, Oscar Wilde, Rebecca Wells
- X: Xenophon
- Y: Yeats
- Z: Marion Zimmer Bradley (cheating?), Howard Zinn, XinXin Zhang
:: ::
::